Oby Ezekwesili as a Personification of True Evil By Nasiru Suwaid

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad”-Prometheus

One of the great lessons I have learnt in life, even as early as my toddler years of adolescence, when I began to discover those unwritten codes of human behavior, one of which is that a gentleman or indeed any man at all, never wins in any dual competitive exchanges with a woman, despite the fact, ordinarily, a Victorian male figure is expectedly much stronger than a female, socially and as a social norm, a man is almost and always favored by the society as a leader, bread winner, representative heir and a father figure, yet, were they to engage in any form of altercation, whether physical or verbal, the man would always be on the wrong or at a loss, at least from the perspective of the community which they belonged to.

This fact and a lesson was glaringly brought to me, so early in life when I and two of my other friends sought to confront the bullying menace of Ifeoma, a girl in our street who enjoys beating up everybody, she was a real tomboy, having short hair and very muscular as a physical frame.

Although, we were able to check her excesses, it was the verdict of everyone after the contest that was most interesting, because, we were unanimously told off and scolded as a response; ‘what have you achieved that you had beaten a woman’, my reply of what if it was she who had beaten us, was met with a retort of yours shall be an unimaginable legacy of shameful bequest, indeed, the fact that our fight was between three against one, was an enough opprobrium by itself. It seems what had happened to me years before as a kid is beginning to manifest itself unto our conversational narratives at the national level, which is the surreptitious attempt to create an enmity between the Nigerian state and the //BringBackOurGirls campaign movement or to put it more succinctly and directly, a kind of no hold barred contest between the Nigerian president and the convener of the global girls rights group, an essentially apolitical humanist movement dedicated to the rescue of the abducted girls from Chibok, which has excited global passion and interest, as a none partisan initiative created to champion the cause of a female child, whose only crime is because she dared to go to school.

It is pertinent to note, within the context of the Nigerian social environment, you would never find a more establishment figure like Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, who is a co-founder of the Transparency International and a pioneer director, a former Nigerian minister of education, former World Bank vice president for the African region and a technocrat. Thus, you would understand my shocking bemusement a few weeks ago, when someone directed me to the contents of one of the many true to type slandering Igbo groups on Facebook, who were calling the woman all types of unprintable names you could imagine but the most instructive being she is nothing more than a Hausa harlot and a prostitute, just because she dared to lead a collection of Nigerians, who perhaps for the first time in the history of the country, they were neither driven by ethnic sentiments nor religious bigotry or even pure political motives of power grabbing and pecuniary gain or filial interest.

The fact that by the ethnic configuration of the people of Borno state, they are most likely to never be of the Hausa breeding but rather, they might probably be from the Kanuri tribe, seemed to have been lost on the ignorant cyber mobs, yet the indigenes of Chibok are not even Kanuri but an indigenous group professing a Christian faith, that is clearly an opposite of what the two predominantly Muslim northern tribes practice, thus by their characteristic worshipping mode, they are professing a faith similar to that of Oby, the preacher’s wife, which is a belief system that a significant majority of the commentators in the defamation forum professes loyalty to. However, despite the distaste in the cowardly vilification of a mother, it was not even the height of the odious infamy, it was when they started proclaiming to the world, she will never replace their principal in the 2015 presidential elections, I began to suspect that perhaps those cyber shouts are not mere innocent rants of misguided youths, that indeed they were only playing a premeditated plot and a script, which is to damage the reputation of someone whom the president sees and saw as a threat to his desperate attempt to cling to power beyond the next general polls.

This obviously conjured presidential thinking is perhaps the reason why Nigeria is presently in a state of chaos today, what with the sponsored impeachments of opposition governors and even those governors from his own political party, who have not exhibited the sycophantic trait and dream of supporting life a presidency for Goodluck Jonathan, while using criminally complicit former militants as unofficial spokespersons of the administration. It is the reason why the security agents of the Nigerian state would rather allow themselves to be distracted into pursuing harmless house wives, when dangerous and vile terrorist are on the prowl everywhere, bombing innocent citizens to smithereens, shooting others into perdition, while hoisting their flag as the new owners of the Nigerian territory of Southern Borno. Meanwhile, what the ‘powerful’ Nigerian Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces only cares about is how he is going to fight women but most specifically, faultless mothers whose only cry and crime is their demand to be reunited with their abducted school girls.